The Drive-in 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, wasn’t a book I expected to write. I didn’t have plans. I had a few ideas left over from the first book, and I from time to time thought about what to do with them, but nothing came to mind. And then, my editor, Pat LoBrutto called.
He wanted a sequel.
I’ve always balanced my career between art and pragmatism. If I want to write something, I generally write it, no matter what. Sometimes, I’m asked to do a project I didn’t originate, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a project I wouldn’t like to do. Often I pass on things I’m offered. But when Pat LoBrutto asked me to do another novel about the Drive-in world, needing to keep my career going, needing money to pay bills, and liking the challenge. I went for it. The first time had been a tough experience that turned out well, so I thought, been there before, so this one will be more fun to write.
It wasn’t. It too was hard. There was something about telling these kind of stories, making them seem simple, and sliding in the ideas I wanted to portray at the same time. But, I had a sense this one was good, even though it was tough. I chose to let it end in what for some might be an anticlimactic manner, but was for me, the perfect ending. As always, I go my own way.
It was received with a little less enthusiasm, but over the years the fans for it have grown, especially those who have read the first book.
I like it quite a bit. I think it has some of my best satirical work. It’s also weird with a side of weird. The first novel had a character called the Popcorn King, who I believe to be as unusual an invention as I’ve ever come up with-or at least I thought so until I wrote The Drive-in 2 with Popalong Cassidy.
No doubt all of these books seem to have at their core a love-hate relationship with the entertainment media, TV, movies, etc., as well as a love for false profits and a strange desire to identify with pretty horrible people.
The novel, like the first, was written quickly, though perhaps a little less quickly. Like the first, I was uncertain what I had wrought. Upon reading it in galley form (I don’t think the term galley is used so much these days), I found myself pleased with it. The first is somehow more powerful, if for no other reason than it’s the first, but this one is highly inventive and as a writer, I got to explore the Drive-in world some more and find out what was out there.
What was out there was pretty weird.
Here, let me invite you on the journey. Keep your hands and feet inside the car, and if you think you see something weird, it is weird.
Enjoy.
– Joe R. Lansdale, 2009
“Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.”
FADE-IN PROLOGUE
Pay attention. When I’m through there will be a test.
One day suddenly you’re out of high school, happy as a grub in shit, waking up with a hard-on and spending your days sitting around in your pee-stained underwear with your feet propped up next to the air conditioner vent with cool air blowing on your nuts, and the next goddamn thing you know, you’re crucified.
And I don’t mean symbolically. I’m talking nails in the paws and wood splinters in the ass, sore hands and feet and screams and a wavering attitude about the human race. It’s the sort of thing that when it happens to you, you have a hard time believing ol’ Jesus could have been all that forgiving about it.
It hurts.
Had I been J.C., I’d have come back from the dead madder than a badger with turpentined balls, and there wouldn’t have been any of this peace-andlove shit, and I would have forgotten how to do trivial crap like turn water to wine and multiply bread and fishes. I’d have made myself big as the universe and made me two bricks just the right size, and I’d have gotten the world between the bricks, and whammo, shit jelly.
It wouldn’t do to make me a messiah. I’ve got a bad attitude.
I do now, anyway.
It isn’t that I expected life to be so sweet and fine that I’d grow up sweating pearls and farting peach blossoms, nor was I expecting to live to be three million and have endless fan mail from long-legged, sex-starved Hollywood starlets telling me how they’d like to ravish my body and bronze my pecker. But on the other hand, I was expecting a little better than this.
Me and my friends went to the drive-in to see movies, not to become part of them.
The evening we drove into the Orbit things started going to hell in a fiery handbasket. We had just gotten settled in, and this big, red comet came hurtling from the sky like a tomato thrown by God, and then the comet split apart and smiled rows of saw-bladed teeth at us.
And when I thought the comet would hit us and splatter us into little sparklers of light, it veered upwards and moved out of sight. What it left in its wake was some bad business.
The drive-in still had light, but the light came from the projectors and the projectors didn’t seem to have any source of electricity. We were surrounded by a blackness so complete it was like being in a bag with a handful of penlights. The blackness beyond the drive-in was acidic. I’ll never forget what it did to that carload of fat people that drove off into it (or what I assumed it did), or the cowboy who put his arm into it and got his entire self dissolved.
Anyway, we were trapped.
Things got nasty.
There was nothing to eat in the drive-in besides the concession food, which was bad enough, but when that got low, people started eating one another, cooked and uncooked.
Then two of my friends, whacked out from lack of food, got hit by this strange blue lightning; (Randy was riding on Willard’s back at the time) and it fused them together and made them uglier than a shopping mall parking lot and gave them strange powers and they became known as the Popcorn King. They weren’t friends of mine and Bob’s anymore. They weren’t anyone’s friends. They were now one creature. A bad creature.
Hello, permanent blue Monday.
The Popcorn King used his weird powers and unlimited popcorn to control the hungry crowd, and Bob and I might have joined them if it hadn’t been for the jerky stash Bob had in his camper truck. The meat kept us from having to eat the King’s popcorn, which had grown kind of funky, and from having to eat other folks, which was a thing the King encouraged.
But me and Bob were realistic enough to figure eating other folks and each other was just on the horizon, so to speak, so we decided, live or die, we were going to destroy the Popcorn King, and we did, with the help of this evangelist named Sam and his wife, Mable, who we thought was dead at the time. But that’s another story and I’ve already told it. Let me just say that Sam and Mable together probably had a lower IQ than the foreskin on my dick.
To shorten this all up, we killed the Popcorn King, smashed him with a bus and blew his ass up, and for our efforts, Samaritan as they were, the King’s followers stripped us naked, called us some real bad names, crucified us and started building bonfires at the bottom of our crosses so they could have us for lunch.
Then the comet decided to come back.
The big red bastard couldn’t come back before we were crucified. No sir. It had to wait until we were up on
